IT’S MARTIAN IMPOSSIBLE!
Musk unveils his Flash Gordon style rocket for Mars jaunt – but expert reckons it’s pure fantasy
Gleaming against the blue sky, this is the rocket Elon Musk believes will fulfil his dream of taking astronauts to Mars.
The 164ft (50m) prototype – with its echoes of the 1930s sci-fi serial Flash gordon – is intended to go into orbit within months.
Tesla founder Musk wants SpaceX’s reusable Starship to carry crew and cargo to the ‘Moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system’.
But yesterday a scientist poured cold water on the extravagant plans, saying the first manned trip to Mars would not happen for at least a decade and that Musk’s project was ‘a fantasy’.
David Whitehouse, a former BBC science correspondent, said: ‘Elon Musk talked about sending thousands of people to Mars in a few years... That’s not going to happen at all. When will we land on Mars? Not in the 2020s.’ He explained that – unlike trips to the Moon, which 12 people have now walked on – Mars is a ‘different kettle of fish’.
Tech entrepreneur Musk and his SpaceX team have proposed developing infrastructure on the Mars and aim to get humans on the red planet by 2024.
But Mr Whitehouse told an audience at Henley literary Festival: ‘The Moon is three days away and you can get back with no problem. Mars is at least nine months away... It’s probably a threeyear round trip – so there is no coming back if there is a problem. It means you need a much better spacecraft, it means you have to have life cycles and recycling, because you can’t take all the food you need to go there.
‘You can’t take all the oxygen you need, you need to recycle it. Experiments show the degradation of the human body is worse than we thought, particularly mental impairment – and that’s after just a year in space. Also there’s radiation and that’s worse than we thought. And the expense.’ However, at the SpaceX launch pad in Texas on Saturday, Musk told a crowd: ‘We need to make space travel like air travel.’ He said the critical breakthrough would be making ‘a rapidly reusable orbital rocket’.
SpaceX currently flies two kinds of rocket – the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket – for NASA, the US Air Force and private satellite firms. It is planned that Starship will eventually fly atop a new booster rocket, the Super Heavy.
‘Can’t take all the oxygen you need’